Though I was not there, I can imagine the scene: it must have seemed like a war taking place in our Mictlan or your Hell. The vast square was only barely lighted by the remains of campfires, and those smoldering embers sporadically exploded into sparks as men or horses stumbled through them. The rain was still falling and making a veil which prevented any group of fighters from seeing how their fellows fared elsewhere. The entire expanse of pavement was littered with tangled bedding, the spilled contents of the Spaniards' packs, the remains of the evening meal, many fallen bodies, and blood making the marble even more slippery underfoot. The flash of steel swords and bucklers and pale white faces contrasted with the bare but less visible bodies of our copper-skinned warriors, There were separate duels taking place up and down the stairs of the Great Pyramid, and in and out of the many temples, and under the tranquil gaze of the innumerable sightless eyes of the skull rack. Making the whole battle even more unreal, the terrified horses still milled and reared and ran and kicked. The Snake Wall was too high for them to jump, but occasionally a horse would fortuitously find one of the wall's avenue openings and escape into the city streets.

At one point, a number of the white men turned and retreated to a far corner of the plaza, while a line of their comrades wielded their swords to keep our men from pursuing them—and that apparent retreat proved to be a clever feint. Those who fled had all snatched up harquebuses as they did so, and, during their brief respite from attack, they put dry charges from their belt pouches into the weapons. The swordsmen suddenly stood back, the harquebusiers stepped forward and all together discharged their lethal pellets into the crowd of our warriors who had been pressing them, and many of our men fell dead or wounded in that single roll of thunder. But the harquebuses could not again be charged before more of our men were pressing forward. Thereafter, the battle continued to be fought with stone weapons against steel weapons.

I do not know what made Cortés aware that something was happening to the army he had left leaderless. Perhaps one of the loose horses came clattering toward him through the streets, or perhaps it was a soldier escaped from the battle, or perhaps the first he heard of it was that one concerted thunderclap of the massed harquebuses. I do know that he and his train had reached the Tlácopan causeway before they knew of anything gone wrong. He took only a moment to decide what action to take, and there was no one to report later what words he spoke, but what he decided was, "We cannot leave the treasure here. Let us hurry it to safety on the mainland, then come back."

Meanwhile, that sound of the many harquebuses had also been heard all around the lake's nearer shores—by Cortés's camped troops and by our expectant allies alike. Cuitlahuac had instructed our mainland forces to wait for the midnight trumpets, but they had the good sense to move immediately when they heard that noise of combat. Cortés's detachments, on the other hand, had had no instructions. They must have jumped alert at the sudden sound, but did not know what to do. Likewise, the white men at the cannons set around the lakeshore had them already charged and aimed, but they could hardly send their projectiles flying into the city where their Captain-General and most of their comrades were in residence. So I suppose all of Cortés's mainland troops were simply standing, indecisive, staring bewildered toward the island dimly, visible through the rain, when they were attacked from behind.

Around the whole western arc of the lakeshore, the armies of The Triple 'Alliance rose up. Though many of their best warriors were in Tenochtítlan fighting alongside our Mexíca, there were still multitudes of good fighters on the mainland. From as far south as the Xochimilca and Chalca lands, troops had secretly been moving northward and massing for that moment, and they fell upon Prince Black Flower's Acolhua forces camped about Coyohuacan. On the other side of the straits there, the Culhua attacked Cortés's Totonaca forces camped on the promontory of land around Ixtapalápan. The Tecpanéca rose up against the Texcalteca camped about Tlácopan.

At about the same time, the beleaguered Spaniards in The Heart of the One World made the sensible decision to run. Some one of their officers seized a horse as it pounded through the camp, swung himself onto its back, and began shouting in Spanish. I cannot repeat his exact words but, in effect, the officer's command was, "Close ranks and follow after Cortés!" That gave the surviving white men at least a destination, and they fought their way from all the corners of the plaza to which they had been scattered, and they managed to bunch themselves in a tight pack which bristled with sharp steel. As a prickly little boar can roll itself into a ball of quills and defy even coyotes to swallow it, so that pack of Spaniards fought off our men's repeated assaults.

Still heeding the shouted directions of the one man astride a horse, they moved in that bristling clump backward toward the western opening in the Snake Wall. Several others of them, during that slow retreat, were able to catch and mount horses. When all those white men and Texcalteca were outside the plaza, on the Tlácopan avenue, the mounted soldiers formed a rear guard. Their swinging swords and the pummeling hooves of the horses held back our pursuing warriors long enough for the men afoot to flee in the direction Cortés had gone.

Cortés must have met them on his own way back toward the city's center, for of course he and his treasure train had gone only as far along the causeway as the first canoe passage interrupting it, where they saw that the spanning wooden ramp had been removed, that they could not cross the gap. So Cortés alone rode back to the island, and there met the disorganized, ravaged remnant of his army, drenched with rain and blood, cursing their enemies and moaning over their wounds, but all fleeing for their lives. And he heard, not far behind them, the war cries of our pursuing warriors, still trying to fight past the barriers of horsemen.

I know Cortés, and I know he did not waste time asking for a detailed explanation of what had occurred. He must have told those men to stand fast there, where the causeway joined the island, to hold off the enemy as long as possible. For he immediately galloped back along the causeway to where Alvarado and Narváez and the other soldiers waited, and shouted for them to shove all the treasure into the lake, to clear the sledges and then shove them across the gap to make a bridge. I daresay everybody from Alvarado to the lowliest trooper raised a howl of protest, and I imagine Cortés silenced them with some command like, "Do it! Or we are all dead men!"

So they obeyed, or most of them did. Under cover of the darkness, before they helped to empty the sledges, many of the soldiers emptied whatever traveling packs they carried, and then crammed into their packs, inside their doublets, even down the wide tops of their jackboots, every scrap of gold small enough for them to steal. But the bulk of the treasure vanished into the lake waters there, and the horses were unhitched, and the men pushed the sledges across the break in the causeway.

By that time, the rest of the army was coming from the city along the causeway, not entirely voluntarily, being pressed backward along it as they fought our advancing warriors. When they had retreated to the point where Cortés and the others waited, the retreat halted momentarily, and the front ranks of the Spaniards and Mexíca came together in a toe-to-toe, standstill fight. The reason was that, although the causeway was broad enough for twenty men to walk abreast, not so many could fight efficiently side by side. Perhaps no more than the foremost twelve of our warriors could engage the front twelve of theirs, and the weight of our numbers in the rear ranks was of no avail.